Dresselhaus received her high school degree at Hunter College High School, undergraduate degree at Hunter College in New York, and carried out postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge on a Fulbright Fellowship and Harvard University. She received a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1958. She then spent two years at Cornell University as a postdoc before moving to Lincoln Lab as a staff member. She became a visiting professor of electrical engineering at MIT in 1967, became a tenured faculty member in 1968, and became a professor of physics in 1983. In 1985, she was promoted to institute professor– the first female institute professor at MIT.

Dresselhaus was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1990 in recognition of her work on electronic properties of materials as well as expanding the opportunities of women in science and engineering and in 2005 she was awarded the 11th Annual Heinz Award in the category of Technology, the Economy and Employment.[9] In 2008 she was awarded the Oersted Medal. IEEE Medal of Honor - 2015

In 2000–2001, she was the director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. From 2003-2008, she was the chair of the governing board of the American Institute of Physics. She also has served as president of the American Physical Society, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and treasurer of the National Academy of Sciences. Dresselhaus has devoted a great deal of time to supporting efforts to promote increased participation of women in physics.

On May 31, 2012, Dresselhaus was awarded the Kavli Prize[2] "for her pioneering contributions to the study of phonons, electron-phonon interactions, and thermal transport in nanostructures.

In 2010, Dresselhaus won the ACS Award for Encouraging Women into Careers in the Chemical Sciences.

In 2014, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

John Polanyi

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1986

Department of Chemistry
University of Toronto

John Charles Polanyi, educated at Manchester University, England, was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, U.S.A. and the National Research Council, Canada. He is presently a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto. His research is on the molecular motions in chemical reactions in gases and at surfaces. He is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of Canada (F.R.S.C.), of London (F.R.S.), and of Edinburgh (F.R.S.E.), also of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy of Rome and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada (P.C.), and a Companion of the Order of Canada (C.C.). His awards include the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of London, and over thirty honorary degrees from six countries.

He has served on the Prime Minister of Canada's Advisory Board on Science and Technology, the Premier's Council of Ontario, as Foreign Honorary Advisor to the Institute for Molecular Sciences, Japan, and as Honorary Advisor to the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Germany.

He was a founding member of both the Committee on Scholarly Freedom of the Royal Society, and a further international human rights organization, the Canadian Committee for Scientists and Scholars, of which he is the current President. Additionally he was the founding Chairman of the Canadian Pugwash Group in 1960, and has been active for 40years in International Pugwash. He has written extensively on science policy, the control of armaments, and peacekeeping. He is co-editor of a book, The Dangers of Nuclear War, and was a participant in the recent 'Canada 21' study of a 21st-century defence posture for Canada. He was co-chair (with Sir Brian Urquhart) of the Department of Foreign Affairs International Consultative Committee on a Rapid Response Capability for the United Nations.

John Goodenough joined The University of Texas at Austin in 1986. He is known around the world for his pioneering work that led to the invention of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery.He identified and developed the critical materials that provided the high-energy density needed to power portable electronics, initiating the wireless revolution. Today, batteries incorporating Goodenough’s cathode materials are used worldwide for mobile phones, power tools, laptops, tablets and other wireless devices, as well as electric and hybrid vehicles.

Goodenough currently serves as the Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair of Engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT Austin. Along with other materials scientists and engineers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, he continues to research battery materials. He studies the relationships between the chemical, structural and electrical properties of solids, addressing fundamental solid-state problems in order to design new materials that can enable an engineering function.

Goodenough received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Yale University in 1944 and his master’s and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1951 and 1952 respectively. He began his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, where he laid the groundwork for the development of random-access memory (RAM) for the digital computer. After leaving MIT, he joined the University of Oxford as a professor and head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory from 1976 to 1986. It was during this time that Goodenough made the lithium-ion battery discovery.

In 1979, Goodenough showed that by using lithium cobalt oxide as the cathode of a lithium-ion rechargeable battery, it would be possible to achieve a high density of stored energy with an anode other than metallic lithium. This discovery paved the way for the development of lithium-ion batteries, which are now ubiquitous in portable electronic devices and electric vehicles.

After leaving the University of Oxford, Goodenough joined UT Austin, where he holds faculty positions in the Cockrell School’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is the author of eight books and more than 800 journal articles, and he is the recipient of numerous national and international honors, including the Japan Prize (2001), the Enrico Fermi Award (2009), the Charles Stark Draper Prize (2014) and the National Medal of Science (2011).

Jackie Y. Ying received her B.E. and Ph.D. from The Cooper Union and Princeton University, respectively. She joined the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992, where she was Professor of Chemical Engineering until 2005. She has been the Founding Executive Director of the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore since 2003. For her research on nanostructured materials, Prof. Ying has been recognized with the American Ceramic Society Ross C. Purdy Award, David and Lucile Packard Fellowship, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, American Chemical Society Faculty Fellowship Award in Solid-State Chemistry, Technology Review’s Inaugural TR100 Young Innovator Award, American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Allan P. Colburn Award, Singapore National Institute of Chemistry-BASF Award in Materials Chemistry, Wall Street Journal Asia’s Asian Innovation Silver Award, International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Jubilee Medal, Materials Research Society Fellowship, Royal Society of Chemistry Fellowship, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellowship, American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellowship, Crown Prince Grand Prize in the Brunei Creative, Innovative Product and Technological Advancement (CIPTA) Award, and Academy of Sciences of Iran Medal of Honor.

Prof. Ying was elected a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina. She was named one of the “One Hundred Engineers of the Modern Era” by AIChE in its Centennial Celebration. She was selected by The Muslim 500 in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 to be one of the world’s 500 most influential Muslims. She was selected as an Inaugural Inductee for the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame in 2014. She was the inaugural winner of the Mustafa Prize “Top Scientific Achievement Award” in 2015. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Nano Today, which has an impact factor of 15.000.

Katsuhiko Ariga has been working on supramolecular chemistry especially related with self-assembly processes, ultrathin films and molecular recognitions. Accomplishments in his researches contribute significantly developments of biomemetic systems as well as physicochemical understanding on interfacial phenomena. Especially, pioneer researches of layer-layer supramolecular assembly have been highly evaluated, and he is also recognized as an authority of supramolecular recognition at the interfaces. Total citation of entire researches exceeded 25000 times. Now, his research team is working on frontier researches for supramolecular materials through entire bottom-up process

Assistant Director for Research Infrastructure
Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
U.S. Executive Office of the President
Washington, DC

Altaf H. (Tof) Carim covers a range of large research facilities, major projects, and physical sciences topics at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). He has been detailed there from the Office of Science in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE/SC) since June 2011, previously serving as OSTP Assistant Director for Nanotechnology until July 2014. He co-chairs or is the lead OSTP representative on a number of National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) subgroups, including the Interagency Working Group on Quantum Information Science, the Subcommittee on Physical Sciences, and the Subcommittee on Critical and Strategic Mineral Supply Chains. He has also participated closely in the development and coordination of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (co-chairing the interagency body that coordinates it from 2006-2008 and 2011-2014) and the Materials Genome Initiative, and is involved in a variety of other materials, energy, facilities, space, and broad science policy issues at OSTP.

At DOE/SC from 2001-2011, Dr. Carim’s responsibilities have included leading the original management team for the Energy Frontier Research Center collaborations, overseeing construction and operations of Nanoscale Science Research Centers and other user facilities, and managing grant and DOE laboratory programs in the structure and composition of materials. Previously, Dr. Carim served for over a decade on the faculty at The Pennsylvania State University and had research posts and activities at the University of New Mexico, Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium in The Netherlands, Philips Research Laboratories Sunnyvale, Bell Laboratories, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. at Stanford University and S.B. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in Materials Science and Engineering. He has authored or coauthored over 85 research publications, primarily in microstructural and microchemical characterization of materials, and his awards and honors include recognition as an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator, receipt of an AIST Foreign Researcher Invitation to lecture in Japan, and participation in project teams recognized with several of the Secretary of Energy's Project Management Excellence Awards.